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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27082951">Haunted</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/BullRun/pseuds/BullRun'>BullRun</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Portal (Video Game)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Post-Canon, i dont think chell will ever truly escape aperature yall</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 05:40:34</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>330</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27082951</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/BullRun/pseuds/BullRun</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
      <p>prompt fill for the 18th: Walking by a place that is said to be haunted.</p>
    </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Max's Haunted Palace 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Haunted</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>prompt fill for the 18th: Walking by a place that is said to be haunted.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>She wasn’t going to go back. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Not now, not ever. She had tasted the sun and breathed unrecycled air. A mongoose loosed from her snare doesn’t return to meekly lay in the broken noose of cut wire. It flees.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>But Chell was nothing if not a realist. So, there in her cramped bedroom in a tiny town full of wary locals was a hand drawn map. Every entrance to that place was carefully plotted and studied. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The little shack in the wheatfield she had left from. A still pond that had no bottom. An artfully collapsed mineshaft opening with the faux wood beams chipped down to the true metal core. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>There was one that haunted her. In the middle of her town’s main dirt road was three perfectly symmetrical holes. They were too narrow for even a child’s hand to fit, but they had a slight suction. Chell shivered every time she spied a giggling child shoving twigs and pebbles in to watch them disappear. This hardknock town had unknowingly built itself after the end of the world on top of a sleeping monster.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>They were intake pipes of some kind, clearly. Chell assumed it had something to do with gathering sunlight for the hard light bridges, but it just as well could have been ventilation of some sort.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Or surveillance. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It was uncanny. Eerie, even. She knew logically that that place was huge, miles wide, but still. Seeing any sign of it even after traveling for days was unsettling. That haunted place that took life after life and spat out only hate and rot.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>And herself. And Her.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Chell thought about her own blurry memories of her vague past and compared them to who she was now. Sharper. More ruthless. She thought about Caroline. She thought about how that place had turned them cold and merciless.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She stood over those pipes with goosebumps prickling her skin and tried not to feel like she was walking over her own grave. </span>
</p>
  </div></div>
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